Richard Blanco

I’ve been writing this since the summer my grandfather taught me how to hold a blade of grass between my thumbs and make it whistle, since I first learned to make green from blue and yellow, turned paper into snowflakes, believed a seashell echoed the sea, and the sea had no end. I’ve been writing this since a sparrow flew into my class and crashed into the window, laid to rest on a bed of tissue in a shoebox by the swings, since the morning I first stood up on the bathroom sink to watch my father shave, since our eyes met in that foggy mirror, since the splinter my mother pulled from my thumb, kissed my blood. I’ve been writing this since the woman I slept with the night of my father’s wake, since my grandmother first called me a faggot and I said nothing, since I forgave her and my body pressed hard against Michael on the dance floor at Twist, since the years spent with a martini and men I knew I couldn’t love. I’ve been writing this since the night I pulled off the road at Big Sur and my eyes caught the insanity of the stars, since the months by the kitchen window watching the snow come down like fallout from a despair I had no word for, since I stopped searching for a name and found myself tick-tock in a hammock asking nothing of the sky. I’ve been writing this since spring, studying the tiny leaves on the oaks dithering like moths, contrast to the eon-old fieldstones unveiled of snow, but forever works-in-progress, since tonight with the battled moon behind the branches spying on the world— same as it ever was—perfectly unfinished, my glasses and pen at rest again on the night table. I’ve been writing this since my eyes started seeing less, my knees aching more, since I began picking up twigs, feathers, and pretty rocks for no reason collecting on the porch where I sit to read and watch the sunset like my grandfather did everyday, remembering him and how to make a blade of grass whistle.

Seventeen suns rising in seventeen bedroom windows. Thirty-four eyes blooming open with the light of one more morning. Seventeen reflections in the bathroom mirror. Seventeen backpacks or briefcases stuffed with textbooks or lesson plans. Seventeen good mornings at kitchen breakfasts and seventeen goodbyes at front doors. Seventeen drives through palm-lined streets and miles of crammed highways to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School at 5901 Pine Island Road. The first bell ringing-in one last school day on February fourteenth, 2018. Seventeen echoes of footsteps down hallways for five class periods: algebra, poetry, biology, art, history. Seventeen hands writing on whiteboards or taking notes at their desks until the first gunshot at 2:21pm. One AR-15 rifle in the hands of a nineteen year old mind turning hate for himself into hate for others, into one-hundred fifty bullets fired in six minutes through building number twelve. Seventeen dead carried down hallways they walked, past cases of trophies they won, flyers for clubs they belonged to, lockers they won’t open again. Seventeen Valentine’s Day dates broken and cards unopened. Seventeen bodies to identify, dozens of photo albums to page through and remember their lives. Seventeen caskets and burial garments to choose for them. Seventeen funerals to attend in twelve days. Seventeen graves dug and headstones placed—all marked with the same date of death. Seventeen names: Alyssa. Helena. Scott. Martin—seventeen absentees forever—Nicholas. Aaron. Jamie. Luke—seventeen closets to clear out—Christopher. Cara. Gina. Joaquin—seventeen empty beds—Alaina. Meadow. Alex. Carmen. Peter—seventeen reasons to rebel with the hope these will be the last seventeen to be taken by one of three-hundred-ninety-three-million guns in America.

Groundbreaking Ceremony, City of South Miami, Sunset Drive Improvements And so it began: the earth torn, split open by a dirt road cutting through palmettos and wild tamarind trees defending the land against the sun. Beside the road, a shack leaning into the wind, on the wooden porch, crates of avocados and limes, white chickens pecking at the floor boards, and a man under the shadow of his straw hat, staring into the camera in 1914. He doesn't know within a lifetime the unclaimed land behind him will be cleared of scrub and sawgrass, the soil will be turned, made to give back what the farmers wish, their lonely houses will stand acres apart from one another, jailed behind the boughs of their orchards. He'll never buy sugar at the general store, mail love letters at the post office, or take a train at the depot of the town that will rise out of hundred-million years of coral rock on promises of paradise. He'll never ride a Model-T puttering down the dirt road that will be paved over, stretch farther and farther west into the horizon, reaching for the setting sun after which it will be named. He can't even begin to imagine the shadows of buildings rising taller than the palm trees, the street lights glowing like counterfeit stars dotting the sky above the road, the thousands who will take the road everyday, who'll also call this place home less than a hundred years after the photograph of him hanging today in City Hall as testament. He'll never meet me, the engineer hired to transform the road again, bring back tree shadows and birdsongs, build another promise of another paradise meant to last another forever. He'll never see me, the poet standing before him, trying to read his mind across time, wondering if he was thinking what I'm today, both of us looking down the road that will stretch on for years after I too disappear into a photo.

for Ruth Behar I’m still thinking about your porch light like a full moon casting a foggy halo in the frigid air last night, the bare oaks branching into the sky like nerve endings inches away from the frozen stars, the pink gables of your Victorian home protesting yet another winter for you captive in Ann Arbor as you practice mambo by the fireplace. I’m following your red-velvet shoes to conga beats and bongo taps taking your body, but not your life, from the snow mantling your windows outside, 1,600 miles away from Cuba. I’m tasting the cafecito you made, the slice of homemade flan floating in burnt sugar like the stories you told me you can’t finish writing, no matter how many times you travel through time back to Havana to steal every memory ever stolen from you. You’re a thief anyone would forgive, wanting only to imagine faces for names chiseled on the graves of your family at Guanabacoa, walk on Calle Aguacate and pretend to meet the grandfather you never met at his lace shop for lunch, or pray the Kaddish like your mother at the synagogue in El Vedado, stand on the steps there like you once did in a photo you can’t remember taking. I confess I pitied you, still trying to reach that unreachable island within the island you still call home. I thought I was done with Cuba, tired of filling in the blanks, but now I’m not sure. Maybe if I return just once more, walk the sugarcane fields my father once cut, drive down the road where my mother once peddled guavas to pay for textbooks, sit on the porch of my grandmother’s house, imagine her still in the kitchen making arroz-con-leche— maybe then I’ll have an answer for you last night when you asked me:Would you move to Cuba? Would you die there?

Not a study or a den, but El Florida as my mother called it, a pretty name for the room with the prettiest view of the lipstick-red hibiscus puckered up against the windows, the tepid breeze laden with the brown-sugar scent of loquats drifting in from the yard. Not a sunroom, but where the sun both rose and set, all day the shadows of banana trees fan-dancing across the floor, and if it rained, it rained the loudest, like marbles plunking across the roof under constant threat of coconuts ready to fall from the sky. Not a sitting room, but El Florida, where I sat alone for hours with butterflies frozen on the polyester curtains and faces of Lladró figurines: sad angels, clowns, and princesses with eyes glazed blue and gray, gazing from behind the glass doors of the wall cabinet. Not a TV room, but where I watched Creature Feature as a boy, clinging to my brother, safe from vampires in the same sofa where I fell in love with Clint Eastwood and my Abuelo watching westerns, or pitying women crying in telenovelas with my Abuela. Not a family room, but the room where my father twirled his hair while listening to eight-tracks of Elvis, read Nietzsche and Kant a few months before he died, where my mother learned to dance alone as she swept, and I learned salsa pressed against my Tía Julia’s enormous breasts. At the edge of the city, in the company of crickets, beside the empty clothesline, telephone wires, and the moon, tonight my life is an old friend sitting with me not in the living room, but in the light of El Florida, as quiet and necessary as any star shining above it.

Que será,el café of this holy, incorporated place, the wild steam of scorched espresso cakes rising like mirages from the aromatic waste, waving over the coffee-glossed lips of these faces assembled for a standing breakfast of nostalgia, of tastes that swirl with the delicacy of memories in these forty-cent cups of brown sugar histories, in the swirling froth of café-con-leche,que será, what have they seen that they cannot forget— the broad-leaf waves of tabaco and plantains the clay dust of red and nameless mountains, que será, that this morning I too am a speck; I am the brilliant guitar of a tropical morning speaking Spanish and ribboning through potions of waist-high steam and green cane oceans, que será, drums vanishing and returning, the African gods that rule a rhythmic land playing their music:bongó,bembé,conga; que será, that cast the spells of this rumba, this wild birthright, this tropical dance with the palms of this exotic confusion; que será, that I too should be a question, que será, what have I seen, what do I know— culture of café and loss, this place I call home.

Someday compassion would demand I set myself free of my desire to recreate my father, indulge in my mother’s losses, strangle lovers with words, forcing them to confess for me and take the blame. Today was that day: I tossed them, sheet by sheet on the patio and gathered them into a pyre. I wanted to let them go in a blaze, tiny white dwarfs imploding beside the azaleas and ficus bushes, let them crackle, burst like winged seeds, let them smolder into gossamer embers— a thousand gray butterflies in the wind. Today was that day, but it rained, kept raining. Instead of fire, water—drops knocking on doors, wetting windows into mirrors reflecting me in the oaks. The garden walls and stones swelling into ghostlier shades of themselves, the wind chimes giggling in the storm, a coffee cup left overflowing with rain. Instead of burning, my pages turned into water lilies floating over puddles, then tiny white cliffs as the sun set, finally drying all night under the moon into papier-mâché souvenirs. Today the rain would not let their lives burn.

I. Although Tía Miriam boasted she discovered at least half a dozen uses for peanut butter— topping for guava shells in syrup, butter substitute for Cuban toast, hair conditioner and relaxer— Mamá never knew what to make of the monthly five-pound jars handed out by the immigration department until my friend, Jeff, mentioned jelly. II. There was always pork though, for every birthday and wedding, whole ones on Christmas and New Year’s Eve, even on Thanksgiving day—pork, fried, broiled, or crispy skin roasted— as well as cauldrons of black beans, fried plantain chips, and yuca con mojito. These items required a special visit to Antonio’s Mercado on the corner of Eighth Street where men in guayaberas stood in senate blaming Kennedy for everything—“Ese hijo de puta!” the bile of Cuban coffee and cigar residue filling the creases of their wrinkled lips; clinging to one another’s lies of lost wealth, ashamed and empty as hollow trees. III. By seven I had grown suspicious—we were still here. Overheard conversations about returning had grown wistful and less frequent. I spoke English; my parents didn’t. We didn’t live in a two-story house with a maid or a wood-panel station wagon nor vacation camping in Colorado. None of the girls had hair of gold; none of my brothers or cousins were named Greg, Peter, or Marcia; we were not the Brady Bunch. None of the black and white characters on Donna Reed or on the Dick Van Dyke Show were named Guadalupe, Lázaro, or Mercedes. Patty Duke’s family wasn’t like us either— they didn’t have pork on Thanksgiving, they ate turkey with cranberry sauce; they didn’t have yuca, they had yams like the dittos of Pilgrims I colored in class. IV. A week before Thanksgiving I explained to my abuelita about the Indians and the Mayflower, how Lincoln set the slaves free; I explained to my parents about the purple mountain’s majesty, “one if by land, two if by sea,” the cherry tree, the tea party, the amber waves of grain, the “masses yearning to be free,” liberty and justice for all, until finally they agreed: this Thanksgiving we would have turkey, as well as pork. V. Abuelita prepared the poor fowl as if committing an act of treason, faking her enthusiasm for my sake. Mamá set a frozen pumpkin pie in the oven and prepared candied yams following instructions I translated from the marshmallow bag. The table was arrayed with gladiolas, the plattered turkey loomed at the center on plastic silver from Woolworth’s. Everyone sat in green velvet chairs we had upholstered with clear vinyl, except Tío Carlos and Toti, seated in the folding chairs from the Salvation Army. I uttered a bilingual blessing and the turkey was passed around like a game of Russian Roulette. “DRY,” Tío Berto complained, and proceeded to drown the lean slices with pork fat drippings and cranberry jelly—“esa mierda roja,” he called it. Faces fell when Mamá presented her ochre pie— pumpkin was a home remedy for ulcers, not a dessert. Tía María made three rounds of Cuban coffee then Abuelo and Pepe cleared the living room furniture, put on a Celia Cruz LP and the entire family began to merengue over the linoleum of our apartment, sweating rum and coffee until they remembered— it was 1970 and 46 degrees— in América. After repositioning the furniture, an appropriate darkness filled the room. Tío Berto was the last to leave.